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Journal Article Throughout the 1990s, scholars interested in fatherhood have generated a voluminous, rich, and diverse body of work. We selectively review this literature with an eye toward prominent theoretical, methodological, and substantive issues. This burgeoning literature, complemented by social policy makers' heightened interest in fathers and families, focuses on fatherhood in at least 4 key ways. First, theorists have studied fatherhood as a cultural representation that is expressed through different sociocultural processes and embedded in a larger ecological context. Second, researchers have…
Soul searching can provide an in-depth understanding of the father's changing role in the family, the language of fatherhood, paternal contributions to child security, and the need to nurture androgyny. This chapter highlights the mythic and spiritual perspectives of these issues that should be integrated with social science and human studies in fatherhood research and policy. It explains that fatherhood is an act of faith in the acceptance of paternity and the social expectations of its meaning. The social expectations are derived from Biblical myths and common views about the callings of…